The Daves Collective

Linux 2.6.0 (boast, boast)
2003-12-18 21:53

Released today, installed today! Yes, we are at home to Mister Smug-face. It's quite usable, perhaps I'll stick with it for now since there's a good-enough workround for each of the issues from when I tried -test11. (Fond memories of when 2.4.0 was released, within 24 hours I had that up and running on a 486DX33 with an ESDI disk, aaah)

d$ cat /proc/version
Linux version 2.6.0 (d@dsds) (gcc version 3.2.3) #1 Thu Dec 18 18:19:29 GMT 2003
d$ 

Further evidence of Global Conspiracy
2003-12-13 12:43

There's an exposé in Wired entitled Microsoft Loses the Swastika. The gist of it is that the naughty squiggle was inadvertently included in an Office 2003 font named Bookshelf Symbol 7 (their excuse being it "was derived from a Japanese font set"; that's certainly plausible to anyone who's seen Bridge On The River Kwai). Yes indeedy, there it is at 0x7E. But the really scary thing is that Character Map is right next to the scientologists' Diskeeper in the Win2K System Tools menu! Tools of the System! Yes, it makes sense now! I wonder if System Information is fnord channeling the fnord fnord Illuminati?

Update: They're watching me!

There's more. Webdings font, 0x85. Now I'm really scared. Gonna leave the light on tonight.

Firmware upgrade on Nokia 221T
2003-12-11 15:47

Exciting! Today they're broadcasting an upgrade for my Nokia 221T DTTV box.
Full writeup in the picture album.

The worst thing about this box is that it looks like a handbag.

For old times sake - titles from The Office
2003-12-10 22:50

Left to right: car park twirly thing, Unisys building (abandoned), some other building (abandoned), O2 building (pity it didn't burn down that time).

Defragging and scientology, DEC and Microsoft
2003-12-10 21:51

Why is the Win2K defragmenter such a pile of poo? Why does it say it needs >15% free to do the biz, even when the biggest single file on the partition is much smaller than the available free space? And why, at 17% free, does it still moan that it only has 8% "available" to it? Why is the fs still fragged to buggery when it's finished defragging, but then if you run it again straight away it defrags a lot more - so why doesn't the sodding thing iterate until it's done a proper job? Why, when you run it on a partition with no reported fragments at all, does it sometimes actually produce a couple of fragments?

Because it was written by "fully trained scientologists, computer skills desirable but not a prerequisite". That's why.

The Win2K defragmenter is a deliberately impaired version of Diskeeper, licensed by MS from a firm called Executive Software who are so intertwined with the scientology racket that the German government threw a wobbly about Win2K until MS grudgingly coughed up a KB article (in German) on removing the defragger. As far as I can tell there are no free-gratis or free-libre alternatives.

If, dear reader, you might indulge the reminiscences of an old fart, ten or fifteen years ago Executive Software was notorious to VMS sysadmins for their, ummm, tenacious sales pitch. This was back when Diskeeper was a defragger not for NTFS but for VMS (in competition with a product called Rabbit-4, or was it Rabbit-7, anyway they eventually renamed it Perfectdisk).

And that leads me to ponder whether NTFS is, fundamentally, a knockoff of an outdated version of the VMS ODS-2 filesystem. Apparently I'm not the only one to wonder. Here's my evidence: (1) both Diskeeper and Perfectdisk were repurposed from VMS to NTFS with apparent ease; (2) the placement of the green NTFS "system files", as shown in the Win2K defragger, is a dead giveaway; (3) both FSes fragment early, and then the performance of each does the same bellyflop. (Incidentally I have similar suspicions about the so-called AdvFS in OSF/1, err Dec Unix, err Doomed64; it's funny how it has the same tunables as VMS... trust me guys, don't be fooled by its name, use UFS instead.)

Certainly the NT kernel is just a knockoff of a primordial version of the VMS kernel. It is a matter of record that VMS progenitor Dave Cutler flit from DEC to MS and there didst begat NT in the image of VMS. But lo, primordial VMS had a dire VM that paged too soon and thrashed the pagefile even unto death at the first sign of memory pressure, and sure enough, open one too many apps on my token Win2K box and the IDE disk makes EXACTLY the same sort of rattling rolling rhythms as the old RA80s used to do ten minutes before the valediction on the console printer. DEC did manage (post Cutler) to make the VM more tunable. Perhaps MS should license a deliberately impaired AUTOGEN from HP? Is Carly a scientologist?

By the way, lots of kewl VAX photos here.

A first go at Linux 2.6
2003-12-08 12:00

Trying out 2.6.0-test11 using the following references - The post-halloween document and HowTo Upgrade To The 2.6 Kernel. Well it mostly worked: here's the dmesg from booting 2.6 and here's my .config. Visible changes were/are as follows -

1. Mouse acceleration within X much much faster, need to set it much slower
2. Stinking nvidia binary-only module not yet rewritten for 2.6 - an unofficial patch is at http://www.minion.de/ but easier to revert to 'nv' driver
3. Peculiar errors launching X (having reverted to nv driver - wtf??)
4. Migration modutils to module-init-tools - cos I use devfs, need /etc/modprobe.devfs, but not in Slackware 9.1 module-init-tools package - had to get source tarball, though since modprobe.devfs is just a static file in there I didn't need to build from source
5. add new sysfs to fstab
   /sys          /sys             sysfs     defaults                0 0
6. devfs no longer provides devpts filesystem at /dev/pts, now needs the old explicit fstab entry as if devfs not present
   /dev/pts      /dev/pts         devpts    gid=4,mode=620          0 0
7. usbdevfs is now renamed usbfs (although presumably there should be some replacement in /sys)
   /dev/usb      /proc/bus/usb    usbfs     defaults                0 0
8. Migration bdflush to pdflush - "warning: process `update' used the obsolete bdflush system call" - just needed to remove 'update' from rc_sysinit
9. syslogd: "process `syslogd' is using obsolete setsockopt SO_BSDCOMPAT" - no sign of a new or patched version of sysklogd, 1.4.1 now two and a half years old, could try migrating to syslog-ng but it's got previous and the "current stable version" is tagged -rc4. Hmmmmm.
10. 2.6 bzImage is much much bigger than 2.4 for similar config - why?
11. integrated version of i2c replaces /proc/bus/i2c with the new sysfs interface for which new userspace tools lm_sensors2 (in cvs) are needed. (Note the lm_sensors mailing list is here.)
12. the alsa emu10k1 driver in 2.6.0-test11 is quite some way behind recent alsa-driver releases (I upgraded 0.9.6 to 1.0-rc1 last week but the kernel seems to be older than 0.9.6), so it will mean manually reverting all the usual ghastly undocumented unversioned manual changes to the asound.state mixer settings, and then at some time in the future it'll all have to be painfully re-done yet again back to where I am now.

Note that the various fstab changes, the emu10k1 mixer settings and the X mouse acceleration are the only things I've noticed that make dual boot between 2.4 and 2.6 a bit grotty. But the main reason for not permanently going to 2.6 is still the criminally irresponsible great kernel header cockup.

Update - Prime Number Shitting Bear

It has come to my attention that the above list looks like Tux is crapping integers. This of course reminds us of the legendary Prime Number Shitting Bear (or Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu as they say in .fi). I just looked and it's still there! Yay!

Charter of the Daves Collective
2003-12-02 14:00

An Historical Document, from the Official Keeper Of The Scrolls and Joint Founder of the Collective, Weasel Rex IOM

CHARTER
of the Daves Collective

1. Some **** or other may get the better of one of us occasionally.
2. We get the better of each other all the time.
3. But NOBODY EVER gets the better of both of us.
4. Anyone getting the better of us will be got the better of by the collective, with extreme prejudice, in our own good time, make no mistake matey.

The most terminally stuffed-up warez release... Ever!
2003-11-28 12:04

How did this start? Well I saw something in alt.binaries.test that looked like a bit of a laugh. Yes I shouldn't, but once in a while, why not. So I dl'ed it. Thats where the fun starts.

Actually it was posted twice. The first pass was labelled '(01/85)' to '(85/85)' and the second was labelled 'Repost (01/85)(01/85)' to 'Repost (01/85)(85/85)'. Hmmmm. Went for the 'Repost', like you would. Tried saving them. Lots of errors. Looked at the raw messages. It's yEnc and PAR2 (the mark of the Beast IMHO). The 01 was the PAR2. 02-13, when joined, make part1.rar; 14-25 make part2.rar; 26-37 make part3.rar; 38-49 make part4.rar; 50-61 make part5.rar; and 62-4 make part6.rar. 65-6, 67-70, 71-77 and 78-85 are the usual PAR2 junk. Nice subject lines maestro.

What's in the rars then? Another set of rars, part01 to part04. Idiots.

What's in *that* set of rars? Looked at the first one. In there was, woo hoo, *another* part01 - but this one was a self extracting .exe. In *there* was -

• a setup tree (hoorah!);
• an HTML file with content in Chinese plugging the warez group's webshite, and a bit of marquee text in English scrolling along at Warp 6 plugging some crap HTML editor;
• two .txt files with Chinese names and Chinese content;
• a .txt file with Chinese name and pseudo-English content, to wit, a mostly uninformative .nfo.

But on closer inspection *this* rar wasn't complete - it needed (at least) a part02. Well, to cut the story short, using this triply-wrapped part01 with the doubly-wrapped part02-04 finally yielded a complete setup tree, including a *second* copy of the html and text files and a proper .nfo from the originating group. Sigh. Lusers. Predictably the warez-lust had long since left me, and I couldn't be arsed actually installing any of it.

Is it too much to ask that warez should be customer friendly?

MRTG graphs
2003-11-25 20:11

I've installed MRTG. As a start, you can admire a snapshot of the traffic graph of my router, automatically updated on a daily basis.

Week to 23 Nov
2003-11-23 14:14

Thursday, Drill - Slewins La - Hornchurch - Harrow Drive - Osborne Rd. That is all. For one thing its bloody pouring with rain today. Unnatural hazard of the week: spotting a brand new Penny Farthing for sale outside a shop in Hornchurch and having the Prisoner music sloshing around in me head for the rest of the day.

Cyveillance
2003-11-23 00:51

So whats this traffic from 63.148.99.229 then? A quick Sam Spade and then Google dishes the poop - Cyveillance, a private snooping business in Arlington, Virginia (an interesting neighbourhood: CompTIA and dead hegemonist oppressors). Their bot goes looking for anything their corporate and government customers wouldn't like, whether that be filez, trademarks or freely held opinions. (Eavesdroppers never hear any good of themselves.) Cyveillance are a seriously big operation. They have no reverse DNS and are proud of it. Their public statement about robots.txt is at odds with other peoples' observations and their bot deliberately conceals its own identity. Of course, as a free enterprise they are not publicly accountable. No surprise that they're in the homeland security racket. Their motto is "Minding your business on the Net", and indeed they are minding my business, whether I like it or not. Cyveillance say they "enable businesses to capture revenue by taking control of their brand identity, digital assets and corporate reputation online". Their customers should consider whether their own reputations are enhanced by being associated with, and should consider the value of intelligence received from, a company that behaves in such a manner. Related information:

• I've got a bone to pick with Cyveillance
• What to think about Cyveillance?
• How to block spambots, ban spybots, and tell unwanted robots to go to hell

A rich source of info about this is in the fora of Webmaster World. However, they are a tiny bit unpleasant themselves - the site throws a wobbly about abuse if you surf in on a deep link and disables Google cacheing of forum messages freely donated by other people. And for the paying punter they have "Private Forums" - to the Daves Collective those words denote a chain of sex shops and a long defunct dirty mag. Anyway, there is posted an interesting Perl CGI script which is supposed to sit somewhere excluded by robots.txt. As soon as Bertie Bot gropes Cecil CGI, Cecil plops Bertie's IP into a .htaccess deny list. Hah! but not really recommended, as a CGI script with write access to a .htaccess file is truly repugnant from the security angle. Anyway I'm too tight to pay for hosting with CGI.

Pudsey
2003-11-21 19:49

Well obviously anyone with sense will avoid Children In Need like the plague, fair enough. But for some never explained reason every year we have to put up with ignorant southerners referring to Paddzey. Thank god the bloody place is now firmly settled in Leeds. Antidote at Martian FM.

info2html
2003-11-16 01:32

Its a long story but info2html wasn't working (broken when I moved it from /opt/local to /opt/net). Anyway there is now a nice page for it at http://info2html.sourceforge.net/. In my day it was damn difficult to find, now the FSF actually carries a link to it. But its still the same old version 1.4.

Week to 15 Nov
2003-11-15 20:31

Monday, anticlockwise via what is apparently Carlton Rd. Tuesday, the same. Wednesday, just to the Drill and back. Saturday: via the Drill to Emerson Park and back on Osborne Road. Note to self, need to suss out how far that is. Right leg hurt a bit today.

This week's unnatural hazards: getting distracted by stuff in skips that's too good to chuck away, sinuses (or is it swollen turbinates), and lungfuls of smoke from antisocial bozos burning their autumnal garden rubbish.

Acknowledgements
2003-11-15 14:31

For the record, the following resources have been useful in building this website.

Core applications

• Content management: Blosxom and plugins iconset, update, categorytree, headlines
• Photo library management: Gallery
• Offline preparation: Apache, PHP, lftp, wget

Graphics

• 80x15 buttons: Taylor McKnight
• Fonts: Jason Kottke's Silkscreen, Nathaniel Porter's Road Sign Fonts
• Apps: TweakPNG, png2ico

Reference

• PNG Support in Internet Explorer for Windows (it bloody doesn't)
  and PNG Alpha Transparency

You've Got Spam
2003-11-15 02:14

It looks like a second spamhaus has picked up my Yahoo addy. Also, YoSucker threw its CPU loop trick again, it took me over 3 HOURS to notice. CPU temp was 57 deg; clearly it's stable... Anyway, so today's King Cnut exercise is to install SpamAssassin, sa-exim and the new YoSucker. It must be World InterPolatedCaps Day.

Tangentially, there is apparently a YoSucker for Hotmail, called Gotmail. Moral dilemma: is it OK to dally with M$ if you are just spongeing off their free services? I think not - they must get something out of it otherwise they wouldn't bother - suspect it's ad revenue, traffic analysis and the chance of lock-in down the line.

Later: well I was seriously offended that SpamAssassin unconditionally plops itself into /usr/bin, typical bloody Perl-head etiquette. The sa-exim config file is fearsome, but it works. Sods law determined that Yahoo's login was timing out all afternoon. Fab. The new YoSucker is flakey, but fair enough, there was a warning that it's not stable. I'll revert it tomorrow, and see if retrieving en clair avoids the loop problem.

Bobby is a Booby
2003-11-13 21:27

I thought it would be nice to check out this nice new webshite for accessibility, so I moseyed on over to Bobby to run the validation check. Well, what a performance, not a single genuine problem but 1001 "manual check" items. Well, to cut a long story short, I ran some of their own pages through the W3C Validator, and they failed. Badly. Then I ran some of their own pages through their own validator and it raised most of the points I'd been stuck for. Hahahahah. There was some worthwhile advice there but it'll be a while before I care enough to work on it.

The Human Sinus, a User's Guide
2003-11-12 15:50

Bad sinus day today (LHS) following overnight rain. Went for a jog to see if that would help. Got back, too knackered even to take contacts out so had a bath instead of a shower. Unfortunately, whereas when your sinus gives birth in the shower you can just gob it out, in the bath you can't. Let me know if this is too much detail.

How this site works
2003-11-11 22:38

A brief writeup about how this site works. It is entirely served as static pages from my ISP, there is no server side scripting at all. The reasons for this are (1) it's cheap and reliable, (2) I could use the same stuff on my old 486 which would creak a bit if it were laden with PHP and (god forbid) MySQL. So it's Blosxom for content management and Gallery for picture management as they both have the capability of local rendering into static pages.

A site update consists of combining three sets of pages into a single tree: (1) a set of static files, (2) pages rendered from the locally hosted Bloxsom installation, and (3) a snapshot of dynamic content (Gallery and anything else I fancy) created using wget. The combined tree is then incrementally mirrored to my ISP using lftp. Lastly, the local tree is retained as a handy backup. And it can all run from cron. Sweeeeet.

Note that I'm using some cunning tricks with Blosxom. As my pages are intended to be 100% static, I don't need to worry about getting a mixture of static and dynamic working. The only purpose the local installation fulfils is for preparing and verifying new content. So, local pages are accessed as normal via the Blosxom CGI script at /opt/local/share/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi, and its $url setting is empty so that it only accesses Blosxom content on the local host. But for rendering static pages I use a second copy at /opt/local/bin/blosxom, in which $url is set to http://www.daves-collective.co.uk/. And I don't use the static_file plugin; all static files are merged from my parallel static tree, either (in the CGI context) by Apache aliases, or (in the static case) at render time.

Updated

For quota reasons I've now split the Gallery content to a different ISP site, but the same principles apply. Also, a bit of tweaking now means only changed content needs to be mirrored to the ISP sites. So the script now looks like this:

#   First mirror Blosxom content to site1
mkdir /srv/www/dc/new-site1
blosxom -password='1of2' -quiet=1 -all=0
for d in /srv/www/dc/static-site1/ /srv/www/dc/rendered-site1/
do
    cd $d
    find . ! \( -name '*.orig' -o -name '*.$$$' \) -follow -print \
    | cpio -pdm -u -L --quiet /srv/www/dc/new-site1
done
cd /srv/www/dc/new-site1
lftp -c "open -u user,pass ftp://site1.isp.example.com; mirror -p --delete -R"
mv backup-site1 backup-site1.prev
mv new-site1 backup-site1
rm -rf backup-site1.prev

#   Now mirror Gallery content to site2
mkdir /srv/www/dc/new-site2
cd /srv/www/dc/rendered-site2
wget -m -k -K -E -q -np -nH 'http://dsds/gallery/?set_offline=true'
cp 'gallery/index.html?set_offline=true.html' gallery/index.html
for d in /srv/www/dc/rendered-site2/ /srv/www/dc/static-site2/
#   Note different order (cf above), for reasons I won't delve into.
do
    cd $d
    find . ! \( -name '*.orig' -o -name '*.$$$' \) -follow -print \
    | cpio -pdm -u -L --quiet /srv/www/dc/new-site2
done
cd /srv/www/dc/new-site2
lftp -c "open -u user,pass ftp://site2.isp.example.com; mirror -p --delete -R"
mv /srv/www/dc/backup-site2 /srv/www/dc/backup-site2.prev
mv /srv/www/dc/new-site2 /srv/www/dc/backup-site2
rm -rf /srv/www/dc/backup-site2.prev

exit 0

Bradford trolleybus pics
2003-11-11 21:41

Wonderfulness of the week! (well, last week)

From: "John Law" <xxxx@xxxx>
Newsgroups: uk.transport.buses
Subject: Trolleybuses
Date: Fri, 7 Nov 2003 21:41:11 -0000

Haven't fully linked it to my web site yet, but I have set up a trolleybus 
page on http://website.lineone.net/~john-mightycat/trolleys.html
Only a few pics so far, Switzerland & UK, but might be of interest. 
More to come soon
John

Utterly wonderful. Matters arising - (1) these photos must have been taken late 1970 or early 1971, cos behind No 745 (withdrawn May 71) is an Atlantean or Fleetline (introduced from Aug 70). (2) No 745 is interesting, according to J.S King's book this was driver training No 060 (which I remember well from its time at Bowling depot in 1968), but subsequently reinstated to full service! (3) Looks like Duckworth Lane depot, not Thornbury.

YoSucker, OpenSSL and Why Perl Sucks
2003-11-11 16:05

There's a new YoSucker out. I noticed this because once again YoSucker threw an infinite loop on me, and I didn't notice for more than an hour (the price of improved scheduler responsiveness) and my CPU temp got up to 58.5. So I went looking at the mail archives and the answer turns out to be the Perl module IO::Socket::SSL which needs to be reinstalled against a new version of OpenSSL (and those seem to be coming out far too often these days). Why the **** is this so? How was I supposed to know this? How does Perl (as an interpreted language in a dynamically linked environment) manage to combine the disadvantages of compilation and static linking? Why is its failure mode so insidious? Why Why Why?

Of course the advice in the mailing list turns out to be a tiny bit inadequate; it is necessary to force a reinstall of the module, like this (and don't get me started on finding documentation about the commands in the CPAN shell) -

perl -MCPAN -e 'force install IO::Socket::SSL'

Havering Palace
2003-11-11 14:48

Radio prog last week about the seriously defunct Havering Palace: hav-pal.mp3. Visions of King Hennery taking young Broody Mary to the Pizza Hut in South St for his weekend access. More info at:

• BBC Radio 4 "Making History"
• Romford Now & Then
• The Sealed Knot

Netcraft Uptime Report
2003-11-11 02:14

Courtesy of Netcraft, you can see a report on the uptime of my hosting at Zen. At the moment they are showing an uptime of over 200 days, mmmmm nice, though their current Apache version is looking a wee bit tarnished.

Curriculum Vitae
2003-11-10 15:22

Here is an updated copy of my CV in MS Word format. I really ought to do an HTML one as well. Doesn't look like the headhunter will be getting back to me any time soon, ho hum

Grand Inauguration
2003-11-10 03:10

Here is the Grand Inauguration of the new Daves Collective website. Hoorah! Lots of it is currently missing and/or doesn't work, and the HTML and CSS are unvalidated, but hell fire you have to start somewhere. And the front page tickles a bug in Konqueror. Tsk. It's probably wrong in Safari too. Well tough shit.

For further drivel see the Index